Playin' Panini

I think that a lot of collectors, no matter what they choose to collect, got bit by the bug when they were children. In my school, it was more of an oddity to find someone who didn't collect something. So, while most of the girls in my classes collected stationery of whatever popular Sanrio character du jour was available, I, however, preferred Panini.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Panini, they're a company that would contract with popular properties (usually Disney) and, to tie in with movie or syndicated cartoons, would release a sticker album. The album featured slots for stickers featuring settei-like poses of characters and screenshots from the show. The point of the album was to get you to buy the sticker packs, which, when I was a kiddie, were about 50 cents each. With about 200 stickers per album and the uncanny probability of pulling 25 copies of one sticker (while receiving no copies of the ones you really needed) in a box, it was a time and allowance consuming hobby. My personal theory was that Panini made one copy of sticker #67 and it happened to be in the pack of the truck that jack-knifed somewhere in Alaska. How else could you explain the elusiveness of some of those stickers?!

You'd think that, after years of spending my allowance on these items, that I'd finally realize the futility of it all. And yet, although I no longer buy Panini stuff (Do they even sell them at the grocery stores anymore?), I'm doing the same with backgrounds. It's gotten to the point that I've created lists of the backgrounds I own, organized by anime title and episode. And each time another auction appears with backgrounds from anime that I collect, I cross my fingers that the seller will feature artwork from an episode whose set of backgrounds I'm trying to complete. And although I realize that I will never own all the backgrounds from any episode, each week I feel lured back to Yahoo Japan in the hopes of finding my missing #67.